Welcome + Opening Remarks

Coffee Break

Optimizing (Sometimes Awful) Content for Email

So often, as email marketers, we're working with content from another channel—whether it's a print ad, a social media post or a CEO's homemade cat video. Learn creative ways to take CTAs, copy, images, headlines (and more!) from other channels and make them email‑perfect, leading to higher engagement rates and a better customer experience. We'll walk away with a list of lock-and-loaded tactics for "making lemonade" with print ads, coupons, social posts, and blog posts.

The Organized Chaos of Email Creation

Because creating emails wasn't already challenging enough, many of us are faced with managing dozens of emails across multiple platforms on a daily basis. In this session, we'll cover requirements and workflows for tracking both recurring and transactional emails. We'll start with asset management: partials, variables, and style guides. Then, we'll move into custom reporting, visual "send flows", and UX flows. You'll leave with a plan to stay sane and shred down the time it takes you to build an email.

10:30–11:15

Email Speed Dating

General Session

Improve your campaigns and get 1:1 time with the speakers. Snag a seat at their tables ask questions, get feedback, and geek out.

Content Clichés: Stop Doing What Everyone Else Is Doing

Does your welcome email contain the phrase "You'll be the first to know..."? Is your email list "Exclusive?" Are your April Fool's Day sales "No joke!"? If you answered yes to any of these, you should attend this session. Kristin Bond of Email Snarketing will discuss common messaging that appears over and over across many different brands, why it's all terrible, and how to make sure your emails are original.

11:20–12:00

Going International: How to Localize Your Campaigns

Are you missing the opportunity to go global? When more than 70% of the world’s 2.3 billion Internet users are not native English speakers—and 85% of Internet users don't make purchasing decisions unless they can access information in their native language, relying on English for all your messaging may be holding you back.

How to Look Good Naked: Optimizing Emails for Image Blocking

Rather than wishing image blocking away, what if email designers embraced this common “security measure” as an opportunity to push creativity to the limits? Whether you’re just trying to optimize emails for image blocking in Outlook or you’re ready to go full-out with pixel art on your next campaign, there are plenty of ways to make your email look great naked.

12:00–1:15

Lunch

Creating the Email Program You’ve Always Wanted

Upon returning to the office after TEDC14, Andrew DePaul completely overhauled his email program. By auditing current processes, implementing new snippets to streamline builds (yes, even for non-technical users), and introducing a simple (yet comprehensive) A/B testing program, he quickly established himself as the go-to email marketing expert inside J.P. Morgan and improved email performance across the board.

He'll present his journey and share:

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The action steps he took to streamline email development.

What a team of any size can learn from a large global organization.

Methods for establishing yourself as the subject matter expert for email.

What you should do on Monday when you're back from the conference.

1:15–1:50

Live Optimization Session

General Session

Beat the post-lunch urge to take a nap with this session packed with plenty of A/B testing suggestions, quick wins, optimization tips, and other advice to take back to the office. Attendees can submit their emails for review, soliciting tips from the audience and our speakers. It promises to be fun, fast-paced and full of insight: Conference Patron Emma will give away prize packs to encourage audience participation!

2:00–2:40

Mobile Madness: How a Responsive Redesign Sped up Plow & Hearth's Production of 60+ Emails a Week

With 50% of Plow and Hearth’s emails opened on mobile devices, they needed to redesign their emails to be as mobile-friendly as their website. Their small team didn’t have the technical skills to build responsive email templates and their aggressive email calendar left little room for a learning curve (sending up to 60+ emails a week, across 6 brands + covering 24 retail locations).

Plow and Hearth worked in partnership with digital agency Whereoware to overcome initial resource challenges, ensure a smooth transition, and ultimately, increase efficiency and quality of 60+ emails a week. Learn how Plow and Hearth’s responsive redesign utilizes a hybrid of both scalable and responsive design, can be easily updated by less experienced email builders, and has cut email execution timelines in half.

Using Tomorrow’s CSS Today

CSS4 may only be in the working draft stage, but that doesn't mean we can't begin to use some of it's capabilities in our current email designs. Variables, color manipulation, custom media queries, and custom selectors are just a few of the powerful new features that can be utilized to take email design to the next level. Stop building emails like it's 1999 and start looking towards the future.

2:40–2:50

Coffee Break

A single audience is comprised of many humans. In the days of batch and blast, determining a single goal for that single audience was straightforward. Micro-testing became our weapon: small changes to large sends delivered large impact. As email marketers usher in a new era of highly segmented campaigns, we risk maintaining myopic measurement strategies. This session contextualizes email KPIs as part of a larger idea of customer value and provides some observations on customer banding and cluster analysis. We hope to inspire strategies that deliver the best content to the humans within your audience.

Perfectly Practical: HTML Typography in Email

From CSS targeting that perfects the art of fallback fonts, to simply making sure you never see an orphan in your emails, learn practical methods you can use to make your typography in every email perfect every time.

3:30–4:15

Email Speed Dating

General Session

Improve your campaigns and get 1:1 time with the speakers. Snag a seat at their tables ask questions, get feedback, and geek out.

Producing Great Emails with Great Teams

Great design doesn’t just magically pop up from great designers. Even the best designer can completely fail inside of an organization that doesn’t support the design process. Hear about the lessons your peers and community have learned as they've cultivated a culture of email greatness.

4:20–5:00

If This Then Email: Bridging the Gap Between Dev & Marketing

Data is at the core of a great email strategy: what behavior triggered this email? What relevant data affects the design and content? How do I deal gracefully with missing data? We'll cover these topics and discuss how best to communicate with your devs to get it all implemented smoothly.

Building Interactive Email

From simple hover effects to complex multi page microsites, we'll look at the code used to build interactivity in email, the potential for what is possible, and how interactive email is supported across email clients.

What is interactive/kinetic email?

How interactivity works: the code behind the magic

Punched card coding: advanced interactive techniques

Static, limited, and interactive email clients: what works where?

6:00–8:00

After Party!

Party Time

Join the Litmus team and fellow conference-goers for a night of email geekery fun! Swing by District Hall, a short walk from the Seaport World Trade Center, for drinks, snacks, and fun!

8:00–9:00

Breakfast + Registration

9:00–9:40

The Art and Science of a Great Email

This session will take you behind the curtain to unveil brand new (and incredibly comprehensive) email engagement insights uncovered by Constant Contact's data scientists. Compiled from the analysis of more than 365 million Constant Contact customer emails, these insights will dig deep into the data behind what factors influence subscribers to sign up, open, click, and convert.

9:40–9:50

Coffee Break

9:50–10:30

Building Privacy into Your Email Design

Anti-spam legislation normally requires specific disclosures be included at the point of email address acquisition and in commercial electronic messages. Do you know how laws such as CAN-SPAM, CASL, and the Data Protection Directive affect the content and design of your emails? We will discuss content requirements, and how those requirements affect the design of modal pop-ups, web forms, and other means of data collection. You'll learn how to display consents and disclosures without major design implications, the right way to link to legal policies, guidelines for sending required privacy updates—and how to do it all without compromising aesthetics and brand appeal.

Responsive Email Without Media Queries

Developing email that’s flexible enough to adapt to the large number of clients that exist—new and old—can be a challenge. Some clients, like Microsoft Outlook, have outdated and poor-performing rendering engines. Others, like Gmail, have user bases that can’t be ignored, but render emails terribly.

In this talk, Fabio will cover the concepts of Spongy Development (a.k.a Hybrid Coding) and Pattern-based Design (a.k.a Atomic Design), and will show how the tandem use of both methods can result in robust, flexibly-built emails that perform well and are “responsive” across a variety of clients without relying on media queries or other modern development techniques.

10:30–11:15

Email Speed Dating

Improve your campaigns and get 1:1 time with the speakers. Snag a seat at their tables ask questions, get feedback, and geek out.

Real-World Email Inspiration

The best email geeks don't wait for inspiration to strike—they proactively seek inspiration from their peers and community. Listen in as experts from two leading sources of email inspiration, Really Good Emails and MailCharts, share examples and data gleaned from thousands of visitors and tracked campaigns. Hear about top browsed categories, most impactful emails, and learn how some of the top ecommerce companies handle their best-performing (but hard to access) transactional messages.

11:20–12:00

Tracking Critical Metrics with Excel

In the world of email marketing, accurate data is essential. Learn how to use good old‑fashioned Excel to manipulate and interpret your data without wasting precious time. Holly Wright will show attendees how to creating robust, custom reports that can be refreshed with just a few clicks, and she'll share a report that is near and dear to her heart—something she refers to as MEGA-REPORT! In addition to talking briefly about the key metrics she looks at on a regular basis, she’ll share a step-by-step process for bringing messy, raw data into Excel, cleaning it up without wasting your entire day, and generating custom, dynamic dashboards that translate into meaningful marketing insights.

Building Emails with Legos

As a marketer you want to have variability in the emails you send to your customers but you often don't want to get designers and developers involved for each email. How can you send unique emails that are guaranteed to be bug free? Food52 solved the problem by creating a modular email system that allows developers and designers to easily create and improve email snippets for marketers to create custom emails. The process has saved our design and development team hours of work and ensures that all of our emails are bulletproof when sent to our subscribers.

12:00–1:15

Lunch

How to Market Yourself

Unless you work at an agency, people don't truly understand the value of email marketing. This presentation will discuss strategies for how to navigate co-workers and leadership alike who don't understand why you can't just send an attachment or CC someone in your email campaign.

1:15–1:50

Live Optimization Session

Beat the post-lunch urge to take a nap with this session packed with plenty of A/B testing suggestions, quick wins, optimization tips, and other advice to take back to the office. Attendees can submit their emails for review, soliciting tips from the audience and our speakers. It promises to be fun, fast-paced and full of insight: Conference Patron Emma will give away prize packs to encourage audience participation!

2:00–2:40

How Emotional Content Outperformed Sales and Discounts

This talk is now ON SALE! Free! 100% OFF! Of course, promotions with sales and discounts grab our attention and maybe even get us to click a button, until we find a better price somewhere else. In this case study, we look at an alternative strategy to drive open rates and responses without driving down the value of our products and services. After all, our offerings provide a solution to the pain points of our customers. By using these pain points and the feelings behind them, we can help customers connect to what we are selling.

How to Automate Your Email Design Workflow with Task Runners

As email designers we know building HTML email isn't straight forward. There are endless tasks required to create a seamless email experience for our end users. However in today's world we can use some of our favorite front-end development tools to help optimize our workflow and save our sanity. We'll cover:

What task runners and build systems are

An introduction to Grunt.js and how to use it

Using a Grunt.js workflow to fully automate your email build process

How to compile HTML, inline CSS/Sass, compress and upload images, and test your emails with Litmus by running just one command

2:40–2:50

Coffee Break

2:50–3:30

Segmentation that Leads to Hyper-Personalized Emails

Everyone knows the key to delivering really great emails is to make them as personalized as possible. But how do you do this when you have hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of users—and you can’t afford to hire an army of email marketers? How can you leave users with the impression that every email was handcrafted specifically for them? How can you go above and beyond personalization using the user’s name, location, gender, or [insert other commonly used demographic data point here]?

In this session, I’ll cover how to use data to effectively segment out your users, how to gather insights to include relevant content, and how to ultimately create hyper-personalized emails that will build relationships with your users, not scare them away.

Post is the New Pre: Using Postprocessors to Revolutionize Your Front-End Workflow

For years, front-end developers have turned to preprocessors like SASS and LESS to fill in the gaps in native CSS. Although these tools have transformed and enhanced the way we write code, they've also forced us to work in nonstandard syntaxes, bouncing from one compiler to the next as we try to find the perfect build process. But what if there's a better way? Learn how postprocessors and transpilers can revolutionize your code and workflow. If the idea of writing CSS4 code today without compromising compatibility sounds crazy, you're in for a wonderful surprise.

3:40–4:20

The Web Comes to Email, But Should It?

Carousels, hamburger navigation, payments, and interactive elements; the technical possibilities of email design are expanding by the day. But with these new capabilities comes a greater responsibility to take a step back and look at which design patterns work well for the medium, as well as for specific verticals and brands. This panel will discuss how we can make smarter design decisions while staying innovative and delighting customers.

8:00–9:00

Breakfast + Registration

9:00–12:30

Responsive Email Workshop

This workshop will lead attendees through the foundations of creating responsive emails, discuss email client support, and provide hands-on exercises and guidance to walk through the steps required to build a responsive email.

Email Community Meetup

Conference Patrons MailChimp and Movable Ink are hosting a meetup at District Hall, a short walk from the Seaport World Trade Center. There will be light appetizers and drinks, plenty of opportunity to network with fellow email lovers, and some fun suprises!

Seaport World Trade Center

200 Seaport BoulevardBoston, MA 02210(617) 385-5000

The Seaport World Trade Center’s location on historic Boston Harbor shows off the bustling Seaport District—offering maximum convenience to the Financial District and Logan International Airport, as well as the North End, Back Bay and all major Boston attractions.

Where to stay

The Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel—just across the street from the conference venue—is offering attendees rooms at the reduced rate of $249 plus tax per night. Rooms are limited and you must book by July 26th. Book online or call 1-617-338-4111 and mention TEDC 2015 to receive the discount.

The Responsive Email Workshop will run from approximately 9am–12:30pm on Wednesday, August 26th. Led by Litmus staff and experts from the email community, this workshop will lead attendees through the foundations of creating responsive emails, discuss email client support, and provide hands-on exercises and guidance to walk through the steps required to build a responsive email.

The Advanced Targeting and Hacks workshop will run from approximately 2pm–5:30pm on Wednesday, August 26th. Led by Litmus staff and experts from the email community, this workshop will demonstrate how to build emails utilizing advanced progressive enhancement techniques. Topics may include using HTML5 video, CSS3/SVG animation, interactive elements, conditional comments for Outlook, and methods for targeting specific email clients and rendering engines.

Workshop registration was limited to 50 attendees each and both workshops are now sold out. Email us to be added to the waitlist.

Wednesday, August 26th—Workshop Day: The Responsive Email Workshop will run from approximately 9am-12:30pm, and the Advanced Targeting and Hacks workshop will run from approximately 2-5:30pm. Both workshops will include lunch.

Thursday, August 27th—Conference Day 1: All passes are valid for regular sessions*, which will run from approximately 9am-5pm.

Friday, August 28th—Conference Day 2: All passes are valid for regular sessions*, which will run from approximately 9am-5pm.